Study reveals how our sense of smell changes the colours we see

Unconscious associations with our sense of smell or odour can even affect our perception of colours finds a new studyThe researchers now emphasise the need to investigate how farreaching such ldquocrossmodalrdquo associations between odours and colours areldquoHere we show that the presence of different odours influences how humans perceive colourrdquo said lead author Dr Ryan Ward a senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool UKOne way our brain makes sense of an abundance of information is by combining information from two or more senses such as between smells and the smoothness of textures pitch colour and musical dimensionsThis sensory integration also causes us to associate higher temperatures with warmer colours lower sound pitches with less elevated positions and colours with the flavuor of particular foods ndash for example the taste of oranges with the colour of the same nameNow a study in Frontiers in Psychology has shown experimentally that such unconscious crossmodal associations with our sense of smell can affect our perception of coloursWard and colleagues tested for the existence and strength of odourcolour associations in 24 adult women and men between 20 and 57 years of ageThe participants were seated in front of a screen in a room devoid of unwanted sensory stimuli for the duration of the experimentsThey wore no deodorants or perfumes and none reported being colourblind or having an impaired sense of smellAll ambient odours in the isolation room were purged with an air purifier for four minutesThen one of six odours chosen at random from caramel cherry coffee lemon and peppermint plus oduorless water as a control was broadcast into the room with an ultrasonic diffuser for five minutesldquoIn a previous study we had shown that the odour of caramel commonly constitutes a lsquocrossmodalrsquo association with dark brown and yellow just like coffee with dark brown and red cherry with pink red and purple peppermint with green and blue and lemon with yellow green and pinkrdquo explained WardThe results showed that participants had a weak but significant tendency to adjust one or both of the sliders too far away from neutral greyFor example when presented with the odour of coffee they wrongly perceived lsquogreyrsquo to be more of a redbrown colour than true neutral greyldquoThese results show that the perception of grey tended towards their anticipated crossmodal correspondences for four out of five scents namely lemon caramel cherry and coffeerdquo said WardldquoWe need to know the degree to which odours influence colour perceptionrdquo the authors wroteThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever